Top 80 Evelyn Underhill Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.”

— Evelyn Underhill

2. “My growth depends on my walls coming down.”

— Evelyn Underhill

3. “God is always coming to you in the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Meet and receive Him there with gratitude in that sacrament.”

— Evelyn Underhill

4. “In the created world around us we see the Eternal Artist, Eternal Love at work.”

— Evelyn Underhill

5. “For lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us every day.”

— Evelyn Underhill

6. “This is the secret of joy. We shall no longer strive for our own way; but commit ourselves, easily and simply, to God’s way, acquiesce in His will, and in so doing find our peace.”

— Evelyn Underhill

7. “Love is creative. It does not flow along the easy paths, spending itself in the attractive. It cuts new channels, goes where it is needed.”

— Evelyn Underhill

8. “The spiritual life of individuals has to be extended both vertically to God and horizontally to other souls; and the more it grows in both directions, the less merely individual and therefore more truly personal it will become.”

— Evelyn Underhill

9. “Adoration is caring for God above all else.”

— Evelyn Underhill

10. “I do hope your Christmas has had a little touch of Eternity in among the rush and pitter patter and all. It always seems such a mixing of this world and the next – but that after all is the idea!”

— Evelyn Underhill

11. “After all it is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life.”

— Evelyn Underhill

12. “The life, beauty and meaning of the whole created order, from the tomtit to the Milky Way, refers back to the Absolute Life and Beauty of its Creator: and so lived, every bit has spiritual significance.”

— Evelyn Underhill

13. “Many people feel unaware of any guidance, unable to discern or understand the signals of God; not because the signals are not given, but because the mind is too troubled, clouded, and hurried to receive them.”

— Evelyn Underhill

14. “Deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy, and patience.”

— Evelyn Underhill

15. “Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.”

— Evelyn Underhill

16. “The note we end on is and must be the note of inexhaustible possibility and hope.”

— Evelyn Underhill

17. “Worship is the one, total adoring response of man to the one Eternal God.”

— Evelyn Underhill

18. “The spiritual life is a stern choice. It is not a consoling retreat from the difficulties of existence; but an invitation to enter fully into that difficult existence, and there apply the Charity of God and bear the cost.”

— Evelyn Underhill

19. “Spiritual reading is a regular, essential part of the life of prayer, and particularly is it the support of adoring prayer.”

— Evelyn Underhill

20. “It seems so much easier in these days to live morally than to live beautifully. Lots of us manage to exist for years without ever sinning against society, but we sin against loveliness every hour of the day.”

— Evelyn Underhill

21. “The mystic cannot wholly do without symbol and image, inadequate to his vision though they must always be: for his experience must be expressed if it is to be communicated, and its actuality is inexpressible except in some hint or parallel which will stimulate the dormant intuition of the reader.”

— Evelyn Underhill

22. “Try to arrange things so that you can have a reasonable bit of quiet every day.”

— Evelyn Underhill

23. “The first question here, then, is not “What is best for my soul?” nor is it even “What is most useful to humanity?” But-transcending both these limited aims-what function must this life fulfill in the great and secret economy of God?”

— Evelyn Underhill

24. “On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.”

— Evelyn Underhill

25. “There is no place in my soul, no corner of my character, where God is not.”

— Evelyn Underhill

26. “Your dreamer may do without a creed, but he always wants a ritual...”

— Evelyn Underhill

27. “All things are perceived in the light of charity, and hence under the aspect of beauty; for beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love.”

— Evelyn Underhill

28. “Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.”

— Evelyn Underhill

29. “Grace is God himself, his loving energy at work within his church and within our souls.”

— Evelyn Underhill

30. “The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man’s life; and until he has realized it, he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers.”

— Evelyn Underhill

31. “Man’s will and God’s grace rise and fall together.”

— Evelyn Underhill

32. “Being, not Doing, is the first aim of the mystic; and hence should be the first interest of the student of mysticism.”

— Evelyn Underhill

33. “When you let intution have its way with you, you open up new levels of the world. Such opening-up is the most practical of all activities.”

— Evelyn Underhill

34. “Mysticism is the passionate longing of the soul for God...”

— Evelyn Underhill

35. “In mysticism that love of truth which we saw as the beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes on the assured aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher guesses and argues, the mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the disconcerting language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram – impersonal and unattainable – the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive.”

— Evelyn Underhill

36. “Love makes the whole difference between an execution and a martyrdom.”

— Evelyn Underhill

37. “Saints are the great teachers of the loving-kindness and fascination with God.”

— Evelyn Underhill

38. “Sometimes I think the resurrection of the body, unless much improved in construction, a mistake!”

— Evelyn Underhill

39. “All artist are of necessity in some measure contemplatives.”

— Evelyn Underhill

40. “Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God.”

— Evelyn Underhill

41. “True contemplation can only thrive when defended from two opposite exaggerations: quietism on the one hand, and spiritual fuss upon the other. Neither from passivity nor from anxiety has it anything to gain.”

— Evelyn Underhill

42. “To “purify” the senses is to release them, so far as human beings may, from the tyranny of egocentric judgments; to make of them the organs of direct perception. This means that we must crush our deep-seated passion for classification and correspondences; ignore the instinctive, selfish question, “What does it mean to me?” learn to dip ourselves in the universe at our gates, and know it, not from without by comprehension, but from within by self-mergence.”

— Evelyn Underhill

43. “A simple rule, to be followed whether one is in the light or not, gives backbone to one’s spiritual life, as nothing else can.”

— Evelyn Underhill

44. “We spend most of our lives conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do.”

— Evelyn Underhill

45. “It looks impossible until you do it, and then you find it is possible.”

— Evelyn Underhill

46. “As the social self can only be developed by contact with society, so the spiritual self can only be developed by contact with the spiritual world.”

— Evelyn Underhill

47. “Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment.”

— Evelyn Underhill

48. “We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike.”

— Evelyn Underhill

49. “There is no trustworthy standard by which we can separate the ‘real’ from the ‘unreal’ aspects of phenomena. Such standards as exist are conventional: and correspond to convenience, not to truth. It is no argument to say that most men see the world in much the same way, and that this “way” is the true standard of reality: though for practical purposes we have agreed that sanity consists in sharing the hallucinations of our neighbors.”

— Evelyn Underhill

50. “It is important to increase our sense of God’s richness and wonder by reading what his great lovers have said about him.”

— Evelyn Underhill